[Breeder] A Sexual Education: The Embrace, Part Two

[TheBreeder]

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The seminary rec complex was deserted on the following Saturday morning. Later in the day the roller rink would open its doors for all-age skating, the music for which could be heard for blocks around on a quiet day. At that time of day, though, no one was practicing in the music rooms, or occupying the meeting rooms we used for our rehearsals. The rink was dark and empty. And Marc stood at the bottom of the basement steps, waiting while I locked my bike.

His hands were on his hips. I remember he wore jeans shorts that he’d probably made himself with scissors and a pair of old 501s. Their hems were ragged and trailing with threads. His plaid shirt was open a few buttons to show off his pale, hairy chest. His beard was barely kempt—but such was the style of the time. His hair was long and puffy. On his feet he wore a pair of Jesus sandals. Standing with his hands on his hips, he actually looked like a pretty cool cat, by the standards of the time. “Fantastic,” he said. “Just fantastic. Are you ready to get into your character today?” I mumbled that I was. “Fantastic,” he repeated.

He used his keys to let me into the rec complex. Across the empty skating rink we walked in the direction of the rooms the theater company was using to rehearse. All the way through that spooky, cavernous chamber he kept up a constant chatter about how’d we’d be rehearsing the pivotal scene of the play that morning, because it was an emotionally nuanced scene that required a great deal of concentration in order to appear real. Had I ever cried on stage before? he wanted to know.

Well, not only had I never cried on stage before, but I’d never actually been on a stage before. “Really?” he said, not seeming to remember I’d told him that salient bit of information at the auditions. “It’s just that you can’t tell you’re inexperienced. You’re a natural,” he said smoothly. “Way better than Topher. I wish—” He shook his head, and left that thought unsaid.

We’d reached the other end of the rink, and pushed through the doors leading to the music practice rooms. I’d taken guitar lessons in one of these little cubbyholes once. While he tucked his scripts beneath his arm and fumbled with his keys, I tried to wrestles with my bred Southern reticence and the little flicker of pride he’d aroused within me. “Topher seems pretty good to me,” I finally said at last, in a last concession to be gracious about my triumph.

“Oh, he’s fine,” said Marc, opening one of the doors and holding it for me to enter. I remember it smelled of old paper and chalk. “He’s just not . . . you know. Shut the door, would you?”

I didn’t know. I was burning to inquire, but I was too polite and had been lectured against pridefulness too many times to muster the nerve. Marc’s keys and notebooks clattered down on the table. He studied the room for a moment, then set to rearranging it. With my help, he pushed the table in the middle up against the wall, and then pulled out one of the bean bag chairs in the corner so that it was closer to the middle of the room.

“This is where we’ll be for the scene in which King David reconciles with you,” he said. With his hands and words he painted the set for me—a lonely corner of ancient Israel, in the shadow of the temple. My mouth filled with dirt and despair and repugnance at the thievery that the head of the ruffians had asked me to do. And then King David, still disguised as a common soldier, promises the boy that he’ll be there to look after him.”It’s got to be a quiet, pure moment,” he emphasized. “It’s the moment when a bond is formed between them, a bond on which the rest of the play hangs. If that bond isn’t there. . . .” He shrugged. “Well, that’s why I worry about Topher.”

Well. I wasn’t going to let ol’ Topher outdo me in the bond department. “I can do it,” I promised, eager to prove I could.

“Yeah?” He seemed delighted, and put his hands on his hips again. “Okay, let’s try this then,” he said, sounding as if he’d just thought of it. He plopped his narrow ass down onto the bean bag chair, at its very edge. “Let me sit here, like I’ll be doing in the script. And you sit here.” He patted the space between his legs.

I knew that the script called for the crippled urchin to hug King David, but I didn’t see how sitting between Marc’s legs was going to help us accomplish it. I didn’t want to be a Topher, though, so with my script in my hand, I turned away from Marc and lowered myself until I was between his ankles. I felt his hands reach out from behind and remove the rolled-up sheaf of paper I was carrying. “This is an exercise,” he said softly, into my ear. “You don’t need a script now. Scooch back.” I obeyed.

I’d never been so close to any other man save my father before, and he’d never really held me in this exact position, his legs spread, my little back to his chest. On either side of my arms Marc’s seemingly endless legs surrounded me, so hairy that they tickled my smooth skin. I could smell him. I recognized the scent as Old Spice, which I secretly applied to my own neck from time to time from a bottle in our medicine cabinet, when my father was out of the house. The sharp, alcohol-laden aroma tickled at my nostrils. “You’re helpless,” said Marc in my ear. His voice rumbled his chest, startling me; I was close enough to feel every vibration throughout my frame. I realized that he was talking not about me, but my character. “You’re lonely, and tired, and hungry. You haven’t eaten in a day or more. It’s hot in the city of Israel, and the noise is endless. You haven’t slept. How do you feel?” I opened my mouth to reply, but he shushed me. “Sssshh. Acting isn’t about verbalizing your response. You want to make it a part of you. You want to be your response. So. How do you feel?”

We’d done similar acting exercises in warmups earlier on in the rehearsal process, in which we’d had to be sizzling bacon in a pan, or worms, or in which we’d paired off and pretended to follow our own reflections in the mirror. I assumed this was just another of those. I thought about how I’d feel, and I attempted to make myself very small. I drew up my legs, and clutched my elbows to my side, and curled forward in almost a fetal position. I got a grunt of approval from Marc. “Very good,” he said. “Now, I’m the soldier who’s been kind to you, offering you a moment away from all your cares.”

He drew his legs in around me, until they were wrapped around my little body. I felt his arms surround me in a tight, firm embrace. His hips moved forward until they nudged against the base of my spine. “That’s right,” he whispered. His beard was against the side of my face. He almost sang the words, so soft and lyrical they were. “That’s right,” he said. “Just relax. Feel it. Feel it.”

I closed my eyes and tried to feel it. I wanted the exercise to succeed. On one level, however, it all seemed odd. Very odd. The script called for the crippled boy and the soldier to have a brief embrace, and then when King David revealed his true identity, for the crippled boy to repudiate the King and throw a crutch at him before limping off-stage in a rage.They certainly didn’t sit wrapped up in each other’s arms like this for any length of time.

And yet Marc didn’t seem in a hurry to let go of me. “Just feel it,” he kept saying in my ear, as he rubbed his jaw up and down my skull. From time to time he would loosen one of his hands and let it run through my hair, or rub my shoulders. "Do you feel it?" He would massage my neck, and hum to himself as he did it, whispering at me to keep my eyes closed and to feel the moment. His legs held me tightly, and his breathing was slow and even, but heavy. I could feel a particular hardness to his hips, behind me. The warmth of the room, and the warmth of his body and his groin in particular, made me drowsy. I gave in to the moment and kept my eyes closed, and let him continue to embrace and to rock me back and forth, slowly, gently, like a man with a baby.

I don’t know how long we remained in that position. It seemed an eternity, but more likely it was a half-hour. At the end of it, he seemed reluctant to let me go. But he did, with some remonstrances to remember that moment when we played the scene. I went home, thinking nothing about it.

But then I saw Topher again within a couple of days, for rehearsal. He looked at me from under his bangs and asked, blandly, without trying to sound curious, “So did you have a rehearsal with Marc?”

“Yeah,” I said automatically.

“How’d it go?”

Hours and a couple of days had passed between those moments on the floor and Topher’s innocent-sounding question. But when he asked in that impassive tone, I realized something: Marc had done the same thing with him, too.

And none of it made sense to me.

I'd known there was something odd about that rehearsal. It seemed like an awful lot of time to devote to a few fleeting seconds in the script. Little sensualist that I was, though, I hadn’t minded those moments of closeness. I'd liked the touching and the massage, which had been innocent enough. I actually kind of relished being in the hairy arms and legs of a cool older guy, or of hearing his laughter rumble through my body or his beard against my neck and ears. It hadn’t been anything I’d experienced until that day, but neither had any of the stuff I’d been doing for the play.

But still. There was something odd about it, and I didn’t have the words to express why. “Fine,” I said, equally blandly. “It went fine.”

“Cool,” he said.

And that’s the only time we talked about it. Or didn’t talk about it, I should say.

I’ve written before that I consider my first overt sexual experience, when a man touched me in a sexual way in a People’s Drug Store, to be the moment that my adult self was born. That afternoon was the moment I developed my first real secret, the first time I started keeping a narrative in my head that differed from the ones my parents and teachers were telling me.

But the People’s Drug Store encounter threw into sharp perspective what had happened that Saturday morning in the rec center. When I looked back on it and thought about the closeness of our bodies, the hardness and the heat at my back, the breath on my nape, I realized we hadn’t been rehearsing. I’d been naive. I’d been young, and blind. Marc hadn't dont anything overtly sexual with me, but I knew with the reasoning of someone years older than myself that he'd been, to say the least, inappropriate.

And Topher probably knew what had been happening even more clearly than I ever had. It made me wish I could've talked to him again, just to compare notes, and to see if he had handled it any differently. But by then, the play was over. Topher had gone back to his own school, and all the people of the cast were memories already slipping away.

I didn’t see Topher again after the play until we were both fifteen. It’s ironic—or perhaps just inevitable—that when we met again, he stood out as the only guy my age I ever had sex with until my early twenties.

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